TRUE AT FIRST LIGHT calls to mind two of Hemingway's previous books, Green Hills of Africa and A Moveable Feast. Both of these books dealt not only with their primary subjects, an African safari and life in Paris, but with the antecedents, inner life, opinions, and concerns of a writer. Each book also began with a preface or foreword indicating the intention of the author or dictating how he intended to have the book read. Green Hills of Africa was intended as an experiment, "a true book"(although it was shaped by some fictional techniques) "to see whether the shape of a country and the pattern of a month's action can ... compete with a work of the imagination." A Moveable Feast is preceded by a statement--much worked over by Hemingway in his notes for the book--that the book should be considered fiction, "But there is always the chance that such a book of fiction may throw some light on what has been written as fact."

True at First Light is preceded by no such statement, but Patrick Hemingway echoes the disclaimer at the beginning of A Moveable Feast in his subtitle for the book--A Fictional Memoir--which appears only on the dust jacket. The entire title carries vastly different implications from the title placed on the excerpts from the manuscript published by Sports Illustrated: "An African Journal" The Sports Illustrated title suggests day to day jottings of daily events, while Patrick Hemingway's title acknowledges the unwillingness (or even the inability) of the writer to turn off the mechanism that, produces fiction. To reinforce this difference, the editor also includes, in lieu of preface, the telling quotation from which he took the title. The passage invokes a lake that the observer knows is not real; he has walked across the area in the morning and knows that the lake is an illusion, yet he sees it as...